Artistic Inspiration

Well, after just getting over everyone having the flu at the same time and having loads of disgusting laundry and a house to decontaminate and clean for weekend guests - my guys were suddenly inspired....

Yesterday, we let the kids open their gifts to help lift the boring doldrums of being sick. Brianna got a calligraphy pen set and nice parchment paper. She usually hates anything to do with "handwriting" and has an ongoing hate relationship with her own. I would agree that I have the same issue. Handwriting being the only thing I failed in 4th grade. In any case, she loved the calligraphy set and set down to work through the alphabet according to the book. She did such a great job! In the meantime Chase, who really dislikes any kind of sit down style work - wanted to write as well. So I found some lined "elementary" age paper and he wrote his name and copied some sentences, which I wrote to purposely make him laugh. Alexa followed suit, and even pulled the papers out tonight to play around with her sentences some more.

The amazing thing I find is that they do as well as if I had forced him to sit everyday and do workbook sheets or a curriculum. It is great to see how a child can really learn and be inspired by following their own interests and timetable. How much we think we know from our past experiences with schooling, that learning must take place in a certain way, or that if it doesn't happen at a certain time, your child is doomed to failure. I may even consider taking up with Brianna's calligraphy set and seeing if I can improve my own handwriting.

Following this, Lexi wanted to watercolor. I had purchased real watercolors from the craft store awhile back for Brianna after she had gotten some watercolor art books from a wonderful "older" friend Aunt Betty. We also got an acrylic set, with canvases. So everyone water painted and Brianna painted two acrylics for her grandma's.

They all made pizza for supper and we read together from "A Christmas Carol" by Charles Dickens. We all love this book! Brianna likes that it uses big words. I like that we all learn new words - by context, words that aren't used anymore in modern fiction. I think as a society we have gotten away from using and understanding rich vocabulary. John does voices for Scrooge and the Spirits, and the Cratchits – which make it all the more interesting.
Amid all this I did manage to make a good dent on the laundry and do some decontaminating ;-)!